I stumbled across this thanks to one of my mentoring teachers on Twitter, Michael Kaechele. You can find the original post by Gary Hayes on his blog, here. Using statistics he found across the web, this counter calculates how many social media events have happened. It figures out how many blog posts have been made, how many tweets tweeted, how many YouTube videos watched, and it goes on and on. Just check it out below (may not show in Google Reader).
I was really surprised by how many YouTube videos have been watched. It’s an enormous amount! Since I started creating this blog post, 114 seconds ago (1:54 mins), 1314812s videos have been watched (the numbers will be different for you since the count starts once you load this page). I will never come close to watching this in my entire life! Now at 246 seconds (4:06 mins) there has been $177359 made from global media messaging and data. That is a lot of money in a short amount of time.
Gary also lists these stats on his page. I’ve reposted them in this post, you can see them here.
- 20 hours of video uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)
- Facebook 600k new members per day, and photos, videos per month, 700mill & 4 mill respectively (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)
- Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets sent daily (source TechCrunch Apr 09)
- iPolicy UK – SMS messaging has a bright future (Aug 09)
- 900 000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)
- YouTube daily, 96 million videos watched, $1mill bandwidth costs (source Comscore Jul 06 !)
- UPDATE: YouTube 1Billion watched per day SMH (2009)- counter updated!
- Second Life 250k virtual goods made daily, text messages 1250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)
- Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)
- Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)
- Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of 2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 mill annually (source Informa PDF)
- SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)
These stats really blow my mind. I knew social media was big, just not this big. These numbers really put into perspective how big social media really is and how much it is part of our world.
Of course as educators we have to see this has huge implications for teaching and learning. Those that don’t or simply see this as a fad or something “those kids do” are missing a huge opportunity. Understanding exactly what that is is challenging and largely what this class hopes to explore.
Dean- This class has been great for opening my eyes to realizing that this isn’t just the fad many may think it is. It’s not the same as Gameboys or Pokemon cards, largely because it can be used to enhance education. I really think all education students should be taking this class or at least something very similar.
Dan- You would think that stuff has to start getting removed at some point but you never know. I bought a 8GB thumbdrive for 20 bucks a while ago. I can remember when the 512 mb ones were that much or more. It’s getting easier to store more and more data, so maybe there is enough room. I can’t exactly see how, but with these numbers being so astonishing, I wouldn’t be surprised that the amount that can be stored is huge as well.
Yeah the youtube one is the one that just is ridiculous. 1 billion views/day, and up to 20 hours of video uploaded every minute. You have to start to think that eventually Google is going to have to start deleting videos (like perhaps if after a month with only 50 or so views the video gets deleted). I’m not sure if this is already in place, but I’d imagine they’d have to start doing something…because those numbers are ridiculous. Great post Kyle, I enjoyed the numbers.